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"... they turned Facebook into a theater of war. They were using military-grade information weapo
"... they turned Facebook into “a theater of war.” They were using “military-grade information weapons” to target Americans. Basically: it doesn’t matter if you don’t use your feeds for politics; your feeds are using you for politics."
Link to tweet
What Everyone Needs to Know About the Facebook Data Breach
You could’ve been affected even if you use other social media apps.
By Molly McKew
Mar 19, 2018
This week, it was confirmed that data analytics company Cambridge Analytica (which aided the Trump campaign) unethically acquired the data of 50 million Facebook users to launch "information warfare" against American voters, targeting posts to them to warp their beliefs. The gut reaction is: Facebook is bad! Or, Trump is bad! Or, Cambridge Analytica is bad! But this isn't just about Facebook, or Donald Trump winning or Hillary Clinton losing, or Vladimir Putin ‘meddling’ or a bunch of relatively creepy, amoral guys in the UK bragging that they can use a handful of likes from your Facebook profile to know you better than your lovers.
This is about you. Specifically, how the stuff you post is being used against you. Social media is free because the commodity it is selling isn’t the platform, it's you. The business of social media is to harvest and sell information about you, through various means. All social media companies — not just Facebook, but Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and a range of other apps and services — work this way. They profit by profiling you, targeting posts to you that will keep you engaged on the platform, and collecting more data to make that targeting more precise, and thus more valuable. The more social media you use, the more overlapping, cross-referenced data you are providing (especially since bigger platforms tend to buy or develop smaller ones, like how Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, so they all connect data sets). And any interested party can gain access to that data relatively easily.
Which is why social media can be so easily exploited by bad actors, foreign or domestic, to target you with psychological attacks that you aren’t supposed to understand. And if one social media company is exploited — because data is shared so readily between them — they pretty much all are. Even if you're not on Facebook, this affects you, and you should be outraged at this deception.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t use your feeds for politics; your feeds are using you for politics.
Yes, this sounds pretty paranoid. To explain myself: I have spent the last decade working in countries that were targeted by intense influence campaigns directed by the Kremlin — countries like Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic States — and have watched how the Kremlin refined and deployed these tactics on social media. I can tell you there’s nothing unbelievable in any of this. The systems described by whistleblowers and evidence uncovered in the recent US investigations and indictments follow the same patterns I've seen in other places. These campaigns are never the fault of just one entity, but a fusion of public and private, government and political and corporate assets.
More: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a19484431/molly-mckew-facebook-instagram-youtube-manipulating-your-mind/
You could’ve been affected even if you use other social media apps.
By Molly McKew
Mar 19, 2018
This week, it was confirmed that data analytics company Cambridge Analytica (which aided the Trump campaign) unethically acquired the data of 50 million Facebook users to launch "information warfare" against American voters, targeting posts to them to warp their beliefs. The gut reaction is: Facebook is bad! Or, Trump is bad! Or, Cambridge Analytica is bad! But this isn't just about Facebook, or Donald Trump winning or Hillary Clinton losing, or Vladimir Putin ‘meddling’ or a bunch of relatively creepy, amoral guys in the UK bragging that they can use a handful of likes from your Facebook profile to know you better than your lovers.
This is about you. Specifically, how the stuff you post is being used against you. Social media is free because the commodity it is selling isn’t the platform, it's you. The business of social media is to harvest and sell information about you, through various means. All social media companies — not just Facebook, but Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google, Reddit, and a range of other apps and services — work this way. They profit by profiling you, targeting posts to you that will keep you engaged on the platform, and collecting more data to make that targeting more precise, and thus more valuable. The more social media you use, the more overlapping, cross-referenced data you are providing (especially since bigger platforms tend to buy or develop smaller ones, like how Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, so they all connect data sets). And any interested party can gain access to that data relatively easily.
Which is why social media can be so easily exploited by bad actors, foreign or domestic, to target you with psychological attacks that you aren’t supposed to understand. And if one social media company is exploited — because data is shared so readily between them — they pretty much all are. Even if you're not on Facebook, this affects you, and you should be outraged at this deception.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t use your feeds for politics; your feeds are using you for politics.
Yes, this sounds pretty paranoid. To explain myself: I have spent the last decade working in countries that were targeted by intense influence campaigns directed by the Kremlin — countries like Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic States — and have watched how the Kremlin refined and deployed these tactics on social media. I can tell you there’s nothing unbelievable in any of this. The systems described by whistleblowers and evidence uncovered in the recent US investigations and indictments follow the same patterns I've seen in other places. These campaigns are never the fault of just one entity, but a fusion of public and private, government and political and corporate assets.
More: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a19484431/molly-mckew-facebook-instagram-youtube-manipulating-your-mind/